


The Lighthouse-Keeper

by patriotismforstetriol



Category: Spirit Animals - Various Authors
Genre: (the Wyrm won), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-25
Updated: 2019-08-25
Packaged: 2020-09-26 08:16:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,303
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20386561
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/patriotismforstetriol/pseuds/patriotismforstetriol
Summary: Stead's tower is a constant across universes, even post-apocalyptic ones.





	The Lighthouse-Keeper

* * *

_ Everyone knows that World Trees are wily things. They don't only fight you with their own power, but also make plans on backup plans to stop you._

_Sometimes, though, they make mistakes.  
_

* * *

On the edge of a world in ruin. Marauding packs roam the land, hunting for living things for their master. Towns are wiped out each day, never to come back and rebuild. But here, at the edge of the ocean, at dawn, the world is still quiet. 

On that ocean shore, far enough back that it is on solid ground, is a little tower of piled stones. A copper dome covers its tip, glinting in the sun. On it is a speck of darkness as the lonely person on the tower polishes the dome.

Swiff and buff. Swiff and buff.

The sun rises and the tower's blinding glare is replaced by a steadier shine. The polisher wipes the sweat from his forehead. In a moment of weakness (why bother?), he lets the drops of sweat fall from his hand onto the dome, then admonishes himself and wipes that spot back down.

He retreats to his perch, a trapdoor cut in the dome that leads to a shallow hollow in the top of the tower. 

The world is in sun, but one horizon is a blur of oily black, reaching towards the sky, towards the moon and stars. 

The man - more a boy, really, shouldn't have been an adult, shouldn't have been a soldier - flops onto his back, letting the walls of the hollow block out that corner of black sky.

He doesn't know why he built the tower (surely a bunker would have been more useful) (no, there's no point in hiding). He'd scavenged the copper from a bell from a fallen city, scraping off the old paint, scraping off the sculpted edges, bending and stretching it into this reflective disk it is now.

On that journey he'd walked among the Many, their shambling now worse than ever as they wasted away, without food, without water, without rest. What would the Wyrm do, then, when it ran out of humans and animals to make into puppets? Why did it even collect them?

The lighthouse-builder had walked among them, shuffling, holding the bell like a shield, in case the Many spotted him. The shield would have been useless if they had.

They didn't sense him anyway, because the worm on his forehead, under his skin, told them he was one of them.

His skin was so /cold/. He didn't think he could ever make it warm anymore. He was sure he was dying, like the others.

He didn't know what his lighthouse was meant to signal to. There were no ships left. The island on the horizon was a smudge, as barren as anywhere else.

Maybe the worm was controlling him too. He wasn't sure. He thought the worm was weaker for him. He could still control himself enough to eat and sleep. Sometimes he wanted to forget about those, just give up. He didn't think that was what had happened to everyone else, though. The others wouldn't just-

He heaved himself to his feet and scanned the horizon. There were a few of the Many shambling his way. They'd tear apart the stones of his tower if they found it. He wasn't sure why - the same reason they took apart the towns they took?

He coaxed his fire to life. He set the pot to boil. His supplies were low. Soon he'd need to go scavenging again.

He waited.

As the Many came to his tower, he shuffled to the edge of his dome, the pot in his hands. He tipped the boiling wax onto the pack's heads. They didn't scream like the people they'd been, just clawed at their faces and slowly keeled over. He turned his head away. 

At one time he'd been worried about his future because of his other curse. Now that didn't even matter. The Wyrm had won. The world's soul - the Evertree - was dead. He knew it.

He didn't look at the motionless bodies on the ground. When the Wyrm needed them it would puppet them back to their feet. For now they lined his tower with all of the others.

He returned the pot to his hollow. He spotted one of its worms inching its way along the rocks, looking for living flesh. 

He didn't count anymore. He watched it move past him, and seized with a kind of helpless fury, he grabbed his cooking knife and slammed its handle into the worm.

* * *

_ It's a lesser known fact that young World Trees are even more conniving. Young World Trees don't play by the rules. Least of all their own rules._  


* * *

He'd watched his friends - his only friends, the ones he thought could become a family, in enough time - be killed or be enslaved, in front of him, and at his turn, he thought maybe it would be good not to have to think. 

Shame it hadn't worked out that way.

The worm on the wall was shrivelled, and collapsed into flaking ash, like it had never been moving or alive. Like the rest of this dead world. 

The blanket he slept on wasn't even red anymore. But his flat alien eyes and the spiral worm above them in his reflection in the copper never changed. Never let him forget.

The black on the horizon had finally made progress. The ocean groaned, then sank visibly, and the black reached up and grabbed the moon. 

It was useless to stand against it. Every power came from the Marked's bond, and now the Wyrm had carefully destroyed all of those. Not that any of them would have been useful anyway. He-

Nothing could beat the monster.

Why bother. He'd end this now.

The lighthouse-keeper stood up, pulled his old cloak on. Picked up the cooking knife, passing it from hand to hand. He closed his eyes, stabbed the spiral worm in his head so viciously he had to yank the knife out of bone. 

Take that, he thought, swaying. He slipped the bloodied knife into his belt, picked up the pot. He tossed it at the copper dome.

The dome shuddered and rang out as the pot bounced down its slope and to the ground.

Drrrrrrrring. Drrrring. Drring.

The lighthouse-keeper stood up on the dome, his feet too light to dampen its ringing much. Blood tickled down his nose. He wiped it away from his eyes.

He would face it, standing up, eye-to-eye. Eye-to-oily-mass. Whatever.

The Lighthouse-Keeper yelled with the thrumming of the copper, pulling his knife from his belt, as the Wyrm's forces - the combined might of the creatures of Erdas - darkened the midday sky and came for him.

* * *

_The old Evertree had protectors and ancient traps to give its world a chance to kill the beast. And as a backup plan, in the old Evertree's world, there was one bond that gave the power of cleansing._

_If the Wyrm had known of all of these plans, if the Wyrm had set in motion its own plans that resulted in the death of the tree, if the Wyrm had broken the bond that cleansed, if the tree had overestimated the human capacity for sacrifice, well, the tree's traps would be gone, and the world would be the Wyrm's. _

_The Wyrm was certainly stronger than the young Evertree. The Wyrm poisoned the new tree from its earliest days, started sending out its own harbringers._

_But young World Trees don't play by the rules._

_If the cleansing power - the Keeper's power - wasn't bound to a bond, the Wyrm couldn't rip that bond apart and destroy the power. _

_ Young World Trees may not leave seedlings, but they will finish whatever they were made to do. One way or another.  
_

**Author's Note:**

> Quick piece based on the existence of Stead's shiny tower and the fact that 'lighthouse-keeper' would be a great piece of wordplay if the person watching over the lighthouse did, indeed, have the same powers as the Keeper.
> 
> This is my first time writing on this site, so let me know if I messed something up with formatting/tagging/etiquette/whatever.


End file.
